Have you ever noticed that when you’re anxious, your breathing changes? I am sure you have, it’s one of the things you first notice about yourself when you feel nervous. You start to feel your heart beating faster and heavier, your breathing changes, getting faster and shallower. That’s how it feels when you are anxious.
I used to love the saying ‘if you have depression you are living in the past. If you have anxiety you are worried about the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present. It resonated with me to reflect on where my mind was time travelling, to the past or to the future, or if I was in a mentally relaxed place, the now.
So when we become anxious and our breathing starts to change, it is totally understandable. Our body is reacting to perceived threats or concerns that are in the future, and quite often what we imagine is far worse than what is likely to happen. Fight or flight kicks in and we react as we would when faced with a sabre toothed tiger in prehistoric times. Our breathing changes because the heart and lungs need to pump blood to the muscles so we can fight or run away. Our body is setting us up to win!
But it doesn’t feel like that when we are calmly sitting on the sofa, our mind time travels forwards and the anxiety kicks in. As our breath gets faster we feel less in control of what is going on which makes us feel worse.
So how can we help ourselves? Focussing on breathing is a good start. I find box breathing to be a particularly useful technique to help with this, you can find videos on YouTube about box breathing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEmt1Znux58
)r simply follow this pattern. Imagine you are drawing a box in your mind.
- Breathe in for 5 as you draw along the bottom of the box
- Hold your breath for 5 as you draw up one side of the box
- Breathe out for 5 as you draw along the top of the box
- Hold for 5 as you draw down the other side of the box.
And repeat until you feel calmer and connected with the here and now.
Simple things can make a huge difference to our anxiety. So why not next time when you feel anxiety starting to build, take a moment to breathe. Trust me it will help!